Before July, Saunders County Sheriff Kevin Stukenholtz had never fielded a call about Bigfoot over a lifetime in law enforcement.

Now he has a big mystery on his hands.

Stukenholtz, along with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, investigated a reported sighting of an unidentified “hairy” creature in late July on a country road that parallels the Platte River. A hair sample found at the site was still being analyzed.

A 15-year-old reported seeing the creature, which he said stood about 7 feet tall on two legs as it ran in front of the vehicle the youth was driving about 5:30 a.m. The creature then disappeared into the trees along the river.

Stukenholtz, who became county sheriff six years ago after a long career with the Nebraska State Patrol, said he has no reason to believe the report was a hoax. His office is awaiting a report about hair gathered from the scene, between Morse Bluff and Linwood, about 60 miles west of Omaha.

The sheriff said that even though he thinks it’s highly unlikely that Sasquatch has shown up in Saunders County, his office has an obligation to check out credible reports.

“We aren’t sure what it was, but we’re looking into it,” Stukenholtz said.

***

Meanwhile, rumors are flying in the Linwood-Morse Bluff area that tracks were found and that people have heard unexplained screams. No tracks were found, according to Conservation Officer Mark Luben of Game and Parks, who investigated the Bigfoot report. The officer said he turned over the matter to the Sheriff’s Office once he determined the report did not involve a game or nongame animal under the agency’s jurisdiction. Luben said he has fielded two previous reports of Bigfoot sightings in his nearly 24 years with Game and Parks. One, he said, turned out to be a rabbit that had left big tracks in the snow. The tracks were misidentified by a Dwight-area resident who had recently moved to the area from Chicago. Luben and Stukenholtz both said the teen who reported the creature sighting does not want to be identified or interviewed.
“When anyone ever says the term (Bigfoot), it’s immediately followed up by a joke,” Stukenholtz said. “They’re certainly not looking for any public ridicule.”Source.

Dr. Jeff Meldrum told the local authorities he was skeptical of the reports “from Nebraska because the state doesn’t have the expansive wilderness necessary for a large primate.”

But Meldrum has not thought expansively or historically about these recent incidents and has not placed them in context.

First off, the location of years of accounts is nearby. The Pine Ridge Reservation is in southern South Dakota, just north of Nebraska. Interlopers would not be out-of-the-question.

There have been more than half a dozen reported sightings of a Bigfoot-type creature in Nebraska since the mid-1970s.

The history of sightings in the state are so old they even link to a well-known criminal.

Mass murder Charlie Starkweather, who was put to death in 1959, said in a journal he kept in prison, while awaiting death in the electric chair, told of how as a boy, he would see a strange upright, hairy creature outside his window in the mornings. I detail the incident in my book, Bigfoot: The True Story of Apes in America.

Other accounts from the area in the last ten years certainly reinforce the notion that parts of Nebraska are just a continued part of the range from the Native reservations farther north.

Janet and Colin Bord looked at the 1977 Bigfoot sightings, which occurred among the Sioux at Little Eagle, South Dakota.

Over the space of a few months, 28 sightings of Bigfoot were reported, and the Bords reference the accounts in their 2006 edition of Bigfoot Casebook Updated. They looked to the work of Mark A. Hall, noted in his “Contemporary Stories of Taku-He‚ or Bigfoot‚ in South Dakota as Drawn from Newspaper Accounts,” The Minnesota Archaeologist, 37(2): 63-78 (May 1978), and his The Yeti, Bigfoot & True Giants, to organize their data in a helpful timeline.

Hall and the Bords have shared with us a good overview of this First Nation’s interaction with Bigfoot over thirty years ago via the following chronology:

2 Responses

Jeff, what good is it to “be skeptical of reports from Nebraska because the state doesn’t have the expansive wilderness necessary for a large primate”?

How much such territory does this animal truly need? The Great Plains were once crawling with grizzly bears – just ask Lewis and Clark – and they’d be there still if we just denied their existence and didn’t bother them.

When the numbers are smaller, which seems likely with this animal, and no one’s bothering it, well, just how doubtful is it, given that there is lots of food?

When the local authority treats the kid’s report seriously, it seems wise not to shoot a potential breakthrough in the foot right off the bat. I really wish scientists, even Meldrum, would stop issuing all these “informed” opinions about things we just don’t know for sure yet.

Nebraska is not the Great American Desert. The bluffs along the Missouri River are covered in trees. Buffer areas of trees follow all the state’s rivers and surround the lakes. The Worlds Largest Man-Made Forest is in North Central Nebraska. Nebraska is also known as The Tree Planter’s State where J. Sterling Morton founded Arbor Day in 1872. Yes, there’s plenty of farmland, but farmers also plant “shelter belts,” wide borders of trees, to cut wind and prevent soil erosion.

All this tree cover offers beltways for animals to move through and around the state. That is shown by the multiple sightings and the movements of mountain lions seen throughout the state in the past 10 to 15 years.